The mobile phone may be increasingly important as an information and content access device. Currently there may be over 2 billion mobile phones globally, versus 800 million personal computers. Mobile operators may be increasingly looking to high value data services as a way to overcome the continuing voice revenue decline. Billions of dollars may be being spent globally on wireless licenses with billions more in investments in the pipeline for development of infrastructure and services by wireless service and content providers. Carriers may be introducing new data, content and multimedia services as a means of generating new revenue stream, reversing negative revenue trends, retaining and attracting customers as well as increasing returns on investment, and extending and differentiating their service offering to consumers. The emergence of these wireless technologies may be creating unique opportunities for wireless carriers, advertisers and publishers to generate additional revenue streams through new and existing customers. As consumer adoption of wireless technology continues to increase, marketing via mobile devices may become an important part of all integrated data communications strategies.
Mobile marketing may benefit consumers, mobile service providers, publishers and advertisers by driving incremental revenue, enhancing consumer loyalty and providing convenience for mobile consumers. Mobile data acceptance may have arrived in many parts of the World and may be expected to increase. Mobile destination portals such as YAHOO! may monetize the mobile searches.
The global business model of mobile marketing to date may depend upon subscription revenue and purchases of consumables (i.e. ring tones, wallpapers, etc.). Slow roll-out and relatively small incremental revenue streams may be jeopardizing return on investment on current and future investments. Wireless advertising may now be seen as the great hope in accelerating revenue growth, especially given the experience of online web advertising. Search may be emerging as both a key feature and a potential universal interface for discovering and accessing mobile information.
However, usage patterns for mobile search and Web search may differ, as well as the expectations of the users and the advertisers. Combined with a completely different user experience, these may change the value of clicks and lead opportunities. Most current mobile devices may have limited browser capabilities that do not support the rich feature set of the Web. Handset capabilities may impact the search behavior of mobile users, where the limitations of numeric-pad keyed entry narrow the searched for terms. The small screen size on mobile devices may have an impact on the performance of the search implementations. The size of screens on mobile handsets may limit the creative that can be displayed per listing, and the number of listings per screen. Current web search marketing systems may not account for these physical differences between mobile handsets and computers.
The mobile marketplace may be very fragmented in terms of handset and network technologies, and this may impact the display of listings and advertiser offer sites. For mobile devices, there may not be an HTML-like standard adhered to by all carriers, and the “standards” that are present may tend to be operator specific, and may be incompatible with other “standards”. This may lead to markets within markets, where, for example in Japan, advertisers may create separate sites and campaigns for IMODE users, and XHTML and WML users. This fragmentation may also be barrier to entry for advertisers due to the investment required to support the different technologies and interact with each individual carrier. Advertisers may be faced with either a large start-up investment, or foregoing traffic from certain operators.